When I was in Thailand, there was one word that the translator translated as proliferation. It sounded very much like the Tibetan word, namtok, which used to be translated as superstitious thought and later was translated as preconceptions. But I like the word proliferation. For me, I get the visual image of one little soap bubble, and then suddenly they just explode all over the place, and soon there are millions of them. That is what our mind does. It proliferates all the time. Somebody looks at us in a certain way, somebody says one sentence, and instantly our mind proliferates. It makes this incredible story, we then draw on all our previous proliferations of something similar, and we create more proliferations. Then we develop hopes and fears for the future, and we develop many thoughts about what this person is like and how he act towards me, how I should act towards him, how I feel about him, and how I wish the whole thing were different. The mind just proliferates.

I found it very helpful just to have that word, proliferation. As soon as I could say to myself, “I’m proliferating,” then it became very easy to press the stop button, to stop proliferating. That is all. You can also have the image of nuclear proliferation. It just takes one country with one tiny little weapon, and then another one, and then another one, and you will have this whole nuclear proliferation. That is exactly what the mind does. It just proliferates and builds this whole thing that it believes is reality, and it gets itself stuck into this proliferated reality of its own creation. Whereas it is easier when we notice that the mind is ruminating, or making up stories and proliferating, to press the stop button and say, “I don’t need to do this.” Then it is finished. Especially when you see yourself proliferating in certain habitual ways that you already know the outcome: “I am really sensitive to this issue; I will just follow it and create this story.” Press the stop button. “I do not need to do this, it is just proliferation.”

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